People who complain to Ofcom…

Puts todays puritans to shame.

A recent report in the Guardian confirmed my suspicion that alot of people who complain to Ofcom are, to put it kindly, morons. Of the 290 people who complained about this year’s Big Brother, it would appear that the majority of them have completely missed the point of broadcast regulation. 200 of the 290 complaints concerned ‘an argument between housemates Marcus Akin and Sree Dasari, which occurred on Thursday’, in which one had mocked the others accent, and the other party had made a verbal threat. Now obviously these kinds of things are done by fictional characters in TV programmes all the time. Which in turn suggests that the people complaining have missed the point of Ofcom. They are not complaining because they object to the impact of certain material being broadcast but because they feel aggrieved on the part of one or other of the contestants over the way another house member has treated them. In other words they are participating in the reality TV game show – but using Ofcom to do so.

So why am I so down on people who complain to Ofcom. Well partly its because, I am an instinctive cultural libertarian. But its also because complaining to Ofcom is a form of activism for which I have no respect. Compared with the current generation of censorious citizens, I do in fact have a grudging respect for Mary Whitehouse – though I disagree entirely with her aims. When she wanted to challenge the media she wrote letters to papers, spoke on platforms and all the rest of it. In contrast to todays Ofcom speed diallers she engaged in a public discourse about what should be on TV.  As indeed she should have – for when one seeks to control what is and isn’t available to viewers, listeners and readers they are engaging with a crucial public issue. The point is she put herself, her ideas and her arguments out there so that they could be challenged and debated by other people with an interest in the matter (ie everybody). She provoked a national debate about something we absolutely should have a national debate about. By contrast, the Ofcom complainer, quietly and anonymously seeking to bend the public sphere to his or her standards makes a depressing figure out of the 21st century citizen.